Rarely Asked Questions.

To finish the sentence: “Seven Realms of Christ’s Authority”. Since all authority has been given to Jesus Christ [Matt. 28:18], how does that play out in the history of humanity? After mulling it over in my mind for about two years, I think that His Authority is subdivided into the aforementioned seven realms, and that these realms are comprehensive, exhaustive, and independently sovereign.
I consider this system to be “standing on the shoulders” of Abraham Kuyper, and the things that he lays out in his Stone Lectures on Calvinism. After reading the book, and talking with my father on various occasions, I began to think last year sometime that Kuyper didn’t go far enough in fully articulating a universal system of culture, and that the gaps could maybe be filled in. I started out some of his main categories — State, Market, Family, and Church — and then starting filtering things I was reading through those categories. I already had them color coded. I played around for a while with matching them with the four medieval humours (blood = sanguine, tears = melancholy, bile = choleric, & phlegm = phlegmatic) and the four medieval elements (earth, water, wind & fire), but that wasn’t working out well at all. As I read and filtered what I read, I found a few things that didn’t quite fit, and came up with Self, Neighbor, and Creation (in that order in time) to catch the rest of what I was seeing, and gave them the rest of the colors of the rainbow (Self getting black/grey). Then I saw that there were seven of them and I started to get excited.
Developing…]

Culturespace is a word I coined to put a name to the following: Each of the realms can interact with itself and the other six in 7 x 7 = 49 different combinations. That makes a square. Then, if the number of different ways that the realms can interact are three (realms “Relating” benignly, good “Checking” bad, and bad “Invading” Good), then that makes a box: 7x7x3 = 147. That box is the Culturespace. I try to represent the box somewhat flatly with the schematic matrix on the Culturespace Scoreboard page. I am maybe 75% convinced that this list of interaction types is complete, which is where your comments may come in handy for to me to ponder and maybe add one more.

Each post is placed in multiple categories to reflect the complexity of the situation represented. I think of it this way: a story, opinion piece, or article sets up a mini-network. The nodes of the network are the realms emphasized in the article, and the connecting, directional lines between the nodes are how the realms mentioned are interacting with each other. So, using my favorite example, an article about a communist state has two nodes, State and Market, and an arrow of invasion drawn from State to Market. This falls within the website category of “State Invading Market”. But the mini-network revealed in any given piece of writing could be much more complex than this. For instance this article on the comparison of the healthcare systems of the USA and Great Britain.
The network for this one is nuts. Healthcare usually fits under “Neighbor Checking Creation”, Britain’s State-run system falls under “State Invades Creation”, and America’s litigious attitude toward health falls under “State Invading Neighbor”, A husband taking care of his wife is “Family Checking Creation”, etc. So it can get get complex pretty fast, which is why one post could fall under many categories. What I’m doing to sort everything out is color-coding each category and using the code of colors to show which link is primarily what category, what category an excerpt from an article might fall under, etc. I think that the human eye can distiguish 169 different colors, though maybe only some can do it consciously. But the colors are a non-verbal cues as to what the realm network looks like in any given post. And that is as far as I have gone with it so far. Eventually I’d like to find or make some bit of code that could explicitly draw out the network for each entry, but I’m walking before I run. Suffice it to say that there is a lot more than just what I can see now and I can’t wait to continue my exploration.
[Developing...]

You may have noticed that “Art” and “Education” are not explicitly mentioned here, though they are two things that Kuyper liked to talk about as themselves.
I don’t consider Art to be a stand-alone realm of itself, but as a tool and a means of communicating ideas within and between each realm.

As for Education, it takes many forms and portrays many subjects: meditation within oneself, conversation with a neighbor, discipline within a family, training in the marketplace, preaching at church, observation and theorization within and about some aspect of the universe, and training, indoctrination, and propaganda within a state. Nevertheless, currently I consider Education to be in the interactions of the Realm of the Neighbor and the other realms, since the Realm of the Neighbor encompasses the virtue of honesty. [Developing...]

It’s an artistic statement about how certain cultural activity is perceived; some cultural activity is hard to see or recognize for what it is. That churches exist or families exist is undisputable, and when a church becomes a cult, or a family falls apart, everybody hears about it. But who hears about it when a church does what it is suppose to do, or when a family is happy and doing well? Nevertheless, at the request of someone, I’ve decided to allow the hard to read parts to become readable by hovering the mouse over the lines in question. Note: apparently this only works when using Firefox. [Developing]

These strings of letter are shorthand for the Seven Realms of Christ’s Authority and the three ways they can interact, respectively:
S = SelfN = NeighborF = FamilyM = MarketC = ChurchU = “Universe” (Creation)G = “Government” (State)
You can see that I actually use different words for the abbreviations of the last two realms, since doing otherwise would lead to identical initials for two pairs of realms, kind of like “Tu” and “Th” for Tuesday and Thursday.
R = one realm Relating to another realmC = one realm Checking another realmI = one realm Invading another realm
You will both sets of these abbreviations use in the Culturespace Scoreboards, and the Mini Scoreboards in the sidebar of many of the category archives.

Thanks to Paul H. for helping me come up with Questions 1-3. If you have any questions you’d like to ask, post a comment here, and I’ll do my best to answer them.